The withdrawal of Charles Freeman as nominee for Director of the National Intelligence Council is obviously welcome. The odious Freeman was not only a shill for Saudi autocrats and a vicious critic of Israel but also a defender of the worst abuses of the Chinese Communists. But we didn’t have to wait long for his defenders on the anti-Israel left to begin whining.
Over at the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman summed up his feelings about Freeman’s demise with a nice anti-Semitic touch: “Pound of flesh: extracted.” This bit of hate was actually quoted with approval on Greg Sargent’s blog on the Who Runs Gov website, which is a Washington Post Company Publication.
We can expect a lot more of this from people like Stephen Walt, M.J. Rosenberg and company who have gone all out to defend Freeman specifically because he is a foe of Israel. Walt, in particular, and those who buy into his “Israel Lobby” thesis will take Freeman’s withdrawal as evidence that Israel’s friends have once again undermined U.S. foreign policy. In reality, all that has happened is that a pro-Saudi extremist who has no place in the government of a democratic nation was belatedly weeded out from a chaotic and poorly run administration. Rather than evidence of the “Lobby’s” hegemony, Freeman’s case shows that for all the talk about Obama’s competence replacing Bush’s incompetence, the Democrats are no slouches in coming up with lemons.
But the renewed life that Freeman’s fall will give to the Israel-haters should not distract us from the real lessons of this battle.
The first is that despite their bravado in the wake of Obama’s victory, the anti-Israel left is nowhere near as close to controlling American foreign policy as they’d like us to think they are. It’s true that Freeman isn’t the only rotten apple in Obama’s barrel, but he should provide the administration with a clear picture of the limits to pushing American foreign policy away from a strong U.S.-Israel alliance.
One of the keys to that alliance is its bipartisan character. Freeman’s appointment didn’t collapse just because the pro-Israel right screamed bloody murder, though without the criticism that was heard from that quarter there is little doubt that Freeman might have slipped through. Rather, he’s gone because there are still more than enough pro-Israel Democrats in Congress who want nothing to do with a policy based on hostility to Israel. It was the prospect of people like Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein jumping ship that showed Obama that Freeman had to walk the plank.
There are disturbing signs that Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell are heading towards a policy that will put more pressure on Israel to revive a futile peace process. But those forces within the State Department and the White House in favor of such a policy have just been shown that the old pro-Israel consensus is not only not dead, but alive and well, and capable of being roused to action when necessary. And, as his willingness to jettison Freeman illustrates, Obama is reluctant to engage in combat with a bi-partisan coalition of Israel’s supporters. There are no guarantees that this will be the last troubling episode so long as Obama is president. But the J Street crowd and others who think they are in charge of Washington just got slapped around. Let’s hope it’s just the first of a series of setbacks for them.
